Tag: renewable

My division of the state Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs recently agreed to collaborate on the electrification of vehicles in Hawaii. This is in part to help reach the state’s mandate for 100% renewable energy by the year 2045. This new initiative, called “Drive Electric Hawaii,” focuses on accelerating cost-effective electric vehicle use. More on the initiative can be found here.

For the logo design project, I chose to create a logo for the newly formed Drive Electric Hawaii initiative. As mentioned in my previous post, I’m not a graphic designer so this was definitely a challenge for me. I also don’t know how to draw so didn’t even attempt to put pencil to paper. So, I just started thinking about what I see when I read “Drive Electric Hawaii.”

I wanted to convey the words, “drive” and “electric” visually. The first thought came to mind was a car and a plug. After doing some research, there seemed to be a lot of that created already so I was deterred from the idea. I then started to think about a steering wheel of a car because it’s right in front of you when you’re driving. That’s when the ideas started flowing.

I started with the middle part of the wheel, creating a rectangle across and another one vertically down the middle on the bottom side. I used the polygon tool to bridge the horizontal and vertical rectangles to get the slanted shape in the middle.

For the word, “electric,” I wanted a font that gave me the feeling of electricity or voltage. This is what I came up with – a bit of a script font that’s neither serif or san serif. A serif font is used for the other words. As for the color of “electric” I went for a teal color that reminded me of a typical Nissan Leaf or Toyota Prius electric vehicle.

As you’ll see from the color palette, I went for only three colors – the teal, dark grey and a green (for the wheel) that sort of reminds me a “recycle” type of green. Again, going for this sort of “clean” energy/save-the-earth kind of theme in colors.

For the wheel itself, I added a stitching in the middle of it, borrowing from what we learned in the Varsity Lettering tutorial. The stitching there was made to give a look of a lane line on a road (in addition to actual stitching on a steering wheel). I had to a play around a little with the dash and gap size of the stroke to get it to how I wanted it.

The plug and cord was the last thing I added to the logo. I used the Shape Builder Tool to delete the grey vertical rectangle on the bottom of the wheel and to create a half circle for the plug with rounded rectangles to finish the pins. The cord was the most difficult part of the logo. I used the Pen Tool to draw a cord from the letter “c” to the plug.

I’m still not used to how the curvature part of the Pen Tool really works so that’s why I spent hours just on curving the cord to how I (sort of) wanted it. Connecting the letter “c” in “electric” and the cord itself was tough. I ended up using the Paintbrush Tool to fill in the connection. Originally, I had the cord going behind the grey part of the steering wheel but thought it would be cool to bring it forward but behind the text. This is the end result for my draft logo.